The telecommunication industry and broadcasting industry share a common vision of offering content on demand. Such content can include audio or visual information or both, such as songs, books or videos. Typically, the content is converted into digital information such as files or packets of information and transmitted to a user over a network. These networks can be wired or wireless, such as broadband cable or cellular telephone networks. They can also be a combination of both.
Typically, at any given moment, the network will simultaneously connect many different users to many different sources of information. Accordingly, it is necessary to configure the network so that different information can be simultaneously sent to different destinations.
One of the techniques for doing this involves dividing the medium of the network into channels, i.e., pathways of communication between two or more nodes of the network. For example, television stations simultaneously broadcast different programs to different people through the same medium (the air) by transmitting television programs at different frequencies. Television viewers select the information they wish to receive by tuning their television to the frequency of that channel. Cable networks can similarly transmit different information at different frequencies over the same wire so that different people can simultaneously receive different programs. Moreover, channels may be created by the use of other techniques known to those of ordinary skill in the art other than frequency, such as spatial or code division.
Even so, the increasing number of users demanding a greater diversity of content and information has created greater and greater demands on networks. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and process which can effectively use channels to deliver different information both quickly and accurately.